Reviewed by:

• Accidental Gravity: Residents, Travelers, and the Landscape of Memory by Bernard Quetchenbach
• Ryan McWilliams

The essays in Accidental Gravity trace Bernard Quetchenbach’s relationship to environmental refuges across his academic career. As the author moves among professorial waystations, the essays flow from the shores of Lake Ontario to the banks of the Charles River, twist between farmland in northwest Indiana and borderlands in Maine, course among estuaries in California’s Humboldt County and swamps in central Florida, and ultimately deposit the reader on high-country plateaus and volcanic lakeshores in Wyoming and Montana. Given this geographic variety, one might mistake the contingencies which guided Quetchenbach’s nomadic career for Accidental Gravity’s shaping principle. But the book is far more ambitious than its meandering course makes it appear. Gently yet firmly distancing himself from Wendell Berry, Quetchenbach moves towards [End Page 297] a form of ecocritical writing that celebrates mobility and resists the privileged status environmental literature typically gives to intergenerational rootedness.

Like a diverging river, the book is split into two sections. The first focuses primarily on suburban East Coast environments (such as Lake Ontario, where Quetchenbach grew up) while the second shifts to seemingly wilder Western ecosystems (primarily in the greater Yellowstone region, where he now resides). However, many of the essays pair eastern and western geographies in order to complicate easy binaries between the natural and artificial. For instance, “Invaders” describes how park service workers at Yellowstone Lake rely on “unnatural” methods such as gill nets to control invasive lake trout— even as Great Lakes ecologists use Yellowstone’s population as seed stock to repopulate the species’ native waterways in Quetchenbach’s own childhood haunts. The resonances between these “confluences” and Quetchenbach’s own biography cause him to reflect on his own status as a newcomer in the West: What does it mean to take temporary refuge in a place that is not one’s own? Are recent arrivals necessarily “invaders”? Or, as bioregionalists have suggested, is it possible to “become native” to a place over time?

By substituting the words “residents” and “travelers” for the loaded terms “native” and “invader” in his subtitle, Quetchenbach injects much-needed nuance into these debates over attachment to place. Several of the collection’s best essays do not make polemic points directly, instead focusing on birds (such as skyscraper-nesting peregrine falcons and Boston’s resident population of Canada geese) that occupy a liminal zone between wildness and civilization. Similarly, Quetchenbach modestly (if somewhat disingenuously) claims that he has “no quarrel with the Wendell Berrys of the world.” But by showing how a traveler’s “wandering life” can ground temporary attachment in humility, he seeks to correct for both the explorer’s imperial impulse and the excesses of “the settler’s way” (121). These distinctions take on particularly powerful dimensions in light of climate change. At one point Quetchenbach wonders whether his own nomadic journey is really so different than the plight of a settler who spends his life in one place but finds his “native woods” migrating northward due to warming patterns [End Page 298] (120). Because such displacements increasingly occur underfoot, the traveler’s worldview emerges less as an elective alternative than as a universal necessity.

Despite these subtleties, the book’s prescient discussions of travelers could be enriched if placed in conversation with environmental justice discourse about transnational migration, climate refugeeism, and temporary resident status. Additionally, the collection too frequently rehearses the observation that we cannot disentangle the human from the natural. In the quarter-century since Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness,” this argument has become a foundational premise of environmental humanities scholarship, not a new revelation. However, Quetchenbach’s accessible, lucid commentary on human influence in seemingly wild places such as the Yellowstone backcountry may shift perceptions for a more popular audience.

A range of readers may find several chapters of particular interest. “Red Summer” is an especially acute account of pine beetles, wildfire, and forest succession in the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, birders will find a kindred spirit...

审核人：

• 偶然的重力：居民，旅行者和记忆的风景Bernard Quetchenbach
• 瑞安·麦克威廉斯（Ryan McWilliams）

《偶然引力》中的文章追溯了伯纳德·奎琴巴赫（Bernard Quetchenbach）在整个学术生涯中与环境庇护所的关系。当作者在教授式工作站之间移动时，论文从安大略湖的岸边流向查尔斯河的河岸，在印第安纳州西北部的农田和缅因州的边境之间蜿蜒而行，加利福尼亚洪堡县河口之间的路线以及佛罗里达州中部的沼泽地，以及最终将读者存放在怀俄明州和蒙大拿州的高地高原和火山湖岸上。鉴于这种地理品种，一个可能的错误，引导Quetchenbach的游牧生涯的突发意外重力的塑造原则。但是，这本书远比其曲折的过程显得雄心勃勃。Quetchenbach轻轻而坚定地与Wendell Berry保持距离，走向[End Page 297]一种形式的生态批判性著作，该著作倡导流动性并抵制环境文学通常赋予世代相传的特权地位。

就像一条发散的河流一样，这本书分为两部分。第一个主要关注东海岸郊区环境（例如Quetchenbach成长所在的安大略湖），第二个主要关注看似更狂野的西方生态系统（主要在他现在居住的更大的黄石地区）。但是，许多论文将东西方地理配对，以使自然和人工之间的简单二进制复杂化。例如，“侵略者”描述了黄石湖公园服务人员如何依靠g网等“非自然”方法来控制侵入性湖鳟鱼—即使大湖区生态学家使用黄石种群作为种子种群来重新填充该物种在克彻滕巴赫河谷的原生水道中也是如此。自己的童年困扰。这些“合流”与Quetchenbach自己的传记之间的共鸣，使他反思了自己作为西方新移民的身份：在一个非自己的地方避难是什么意思？最近到来的人一定是“入侵者”吗？或者，如生物区域主义者所建议的那样，随着时间的流逝，是否有可能“成为本地人”？

通过用“居民”和“旅行者”一词代替副词中的“本国”和“侵略者”，奎彻登巴赫为这些关于依附地点的辩论注入了急需的细微差别。该系列的几篇最佳论文并没有直接指出争论点，而是着眼于在荒野和文明之间占据边缘区域的鸟类（例如摩天大楼筑巢的游eg猎鹰和波士顿的加拿大鹅居民）。同样，奎彻巴赫（Qetchenbach）谦虚地（即使有些不为人所知）声称他“与世界上的温德尔·贝瑞斯（Wendell Berrys）吵架”。但是，通过展示旅行者的“游荡生活”如何使他们的谦卑暂时停留在地面上，他寻求纠正探险家的帝国冲动和“定居者的方式”的过分行为（121）。鉴于气候变化，这些区别具有特别重要的意义。奎琴巴赫在某一时刻想知道自己的游牧旅程是否真的与定居者的困境有很大不同，定居者在一个地方度过了一生，但发现他的“原生树林”由于变暖的方式向北迁移[结束页298]（120）。由于这种流离失所现象越来越多地发生在脚下，因此旅行者的世界观作为一种选择而不是作为一种普遍必需品而出现。

尽管有这些微妙之处，但如果与有关跨国移民，气候难民和临时居民身份的环境正义话题进行对话，本书对旅行者的先见之明的讨论可能会得到充实。此外，该收藏过于频繁地演练了这样的观察：我们无法将人类与自然区分开。在克朗（Cronon）的《荒野之患》（Trouble with Wilderness）以来的25年中，这一论点已成为环境人文学科学术研究的基础前提，而不是新的启示。但是，奎彻登巴赫（Quetchenbach）关于人类在看似荒野的地方（例如黄石偏僻地区）的影响的清晰易懂的评论可能会改变人们的看法。

大量的读者可能会发现几章特别感兴趣。“红色夏天”是洛矶山脉中松甲虫，野火和森林演替的一个特别尖锐的描述。同时，观鸟者会发现一种友善的精神。